


The House Of Sand

by PartiallyStars_MostlyVoid



Category: The Property of Hate
Genre: Gen, Madras finds a new source of profit, exercises in word arranging, hadn't written anything for Madras before, so this was an interesting challenge
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-28
Updated: 2016-01-28
Packaged: 2018-05-16 18:26:25
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,082
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5836129
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PartiallyStars_MostlyVoid/pseuds/PartiallyStars_MostlyVoid
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Madras considers the dying days.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The House Of Sand

There is no more colour left to sell.

The pink-purples and the scarlets had been the first to go, followed by the warmer hues of green. Frosty blues and slippery yellows stuck around for a little while longer, unwanted as they were, until the urgency of demand outgrew the quality of the supply. Even the turquoise has been gradually stripped from the walls, slowly turning them to the colour of old bone as the days slunk by, each one slower and hungrier and harder than the last. The House became a microcosm of the world outside, decaying, fading, cannibalised.

The dreams and the nightmares are still there, of course. The day people stop dreaming will be a sad day indeed, but they’re useful only for keeping fires lit now. The Fears are bigger, more active, and the wounds struck by them run deeper than any dream can heal. And there are far, far too many of them. Tossing any available amount of dreams at that lot would be like trying to drain a lake by throwing a sponge into it.

They don’t approach the House, though, for all that they put in irregular appearances to pace the land beyond it’s borders, rattling and keening, filling the air with a stench like rotted vegetation and, increasingly, rusting metal. They just daren’t come any closer. Not yet. They can feel the power of this place in their primitive, angular minds, although no trees grow within it’s borders. This is power of a different kind, one the owner of the House brought with her. The land it occupies belongs to her, for a start; something she claimed and cultivated when she first set up shop here, a long, long time ago. And in this world, that counts for a lot. It has its own terms of existence by now, which read that the House, both the structure and the turf on which is stands, is not theirs to take root in, be they Fear or tree, and should they try, they’ll find themselves playing a game where the odds are no longer stacked in their favour. But the rules of the world are being altered, rewritten in a blackened, jagged hand and she doesn’t know how long she can hold out against those changes which would cause her harm. As for the others… well, let it never be said that she was nothing if not adaptable. After all, while the colour was gone and the use for dreams is decreasing day by day, there was still one more potential resource to be mined.

Because the trees are dying. Not sickening, or hibernating, or any such impersonating verb, but really, truly dying. They melt and twist, slumping downwards, branches spiraling outwards as uncontrollable growths, as if they were trying, in a last-ditch attempt at survival, to create limbs that they might then use to uproot themselves and lope away to healthier climes. When she had examined them more closely, she had found their apparently smooth surfaces were actually minutely pitted and ridged. She drew her hand across the damp, whorled surface, and her fingers came away sticky with residue. The overall effect was decidedly unpleasant- like feeling the roof of someone’s mouth.

But what interested her most as she observed these new and obvious signs of decay, were the new plants that sprouted from the remnants of the old. Flowers that grew, aged and fossilized into the sloughs of matter they sprang from within days, sometimes hours. Too fast was their passing, much too fast, too much time crushed into such a short lifespan, unable to dissipate as it should. So it accumulated in fragments along the fossilized ridges, glistering like glass embedded between gum and tooth.

She watched the motion of the flowers from her window, and thought. She could leave. More than that, she should leave. There was no point in waiting around for the world to end. It was too far gone, the disease sunk too deep into its bones, too soft and rotten to hold itself together for much longer. But an edge-merchant like herself always knows how to turn a profit, even on the thinnest of margins. And besides, while she felt nothing as saccharine as affection for this place, something nevertheless made her drag her heels a little more than she cared to admit to herself.

 _You’ve gone soft,_ her shadow whispered, _another time, another place, you wouldn’t have thought twice about leaving._ She glared- an impressive expression on somebody whose face is roughly seventy percent eyeball- and banished it behind her, where it lurked, unseen but not unheard.

So she went out, and asked the land to move, and it obeyed, peeling itself into the air in thick, wet slabs. It crawled over the invisible border of her territory, twisting and oscillating, and she stepped lightly from piece to floating piece as it rearranged itself. It rotated to bring in the sickened remains of trees, from which she coaxed splintered seconds with tweezers and a needle, pulling fractured hours like teeth. She gathered them, little more than a cupful at a time, took them back to her workroom where she set about grinding them down into a fine powder. At her back, a row of open ended glass capsules stood gleaming, pinched tight in the middle to resemble figures of eight, and none of which were bigger than her little finger.

She works carefully, diligently, the only way she knows how. It’s slow work, but business is slower. She lines the tiny hourglasses on the trinket shelf behind the counter, and stashes the rest in one of the numerous drawers that line the colourless walls. And the next time someone with something worth bartering comes hammering on her door, she offers up the little twist of glass and time with a smile and a gentle insinuation that here is a chance to stave off the inevitable for just a little while longer. And they always take it, not quite realising all that they’re trading their paltry treasures in for is the means to prolong their own misery. She doesn’t correct them. Capitalizing on cowardice. It wouldn’t be the first time.

She’ll leave soon, some day, there’s no doubt about that. Some day, some final disc will slip in the backbone of the world and everything will come crashing down for good. Madras does not intend to be around to see it. She’ll move on. But not yet.

Not yet.


End file.
